Enchantments by Kathryn Harrison: Written in Royal Blood

A surreal tale fueled by a legendarily randy real-life healer and his lion-taming daughter

What possessed novelist and memoirist Kathryn Harrison to seize upon ­Grigory Rasputin, the peasant mystic who beguiled the doomed house of the last Tsar, as the catalyst of her new novel, ­Enchantments (Random House)? She traces his lure to "a particular childhood event":

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"I was in a car accident with my grand­father when I was five," Harrison ­recalls, speaking from her Brooklyn home. "I was standing outside the car. I'd ­gotten lacerated and there was a lot of blood pouring—it looked to me—out of my face. And by some weird coincidence my ­mother happened to be driving by, and she pulled over and sprang out of her car" to stop the bleeding.

When Harrison read ­Robert Massie's blockbusting ­account of the end of the Romanov ­dynasty, Nicholas and Alexandra ("the first sort of ­legitimately adult book I'd read and understood"), at age 11, she was transfixed, she says, by the ­drama of Rasputin's apparent ability to stop the hemo­philiac bleeding of Alexis, the royal couple's son and intended successor.

Finally a few years ago Harrison came across further information: "One doesn't think of Rasputin as a family man," she notes drily about the grubby faith-healer from Siberia who showed up in the spiritist hothouse of St. Petersburg and was soon bestowing sexual healing on a whole string of society ladies. "I was intrigued that he had a wife and children—and even more interested to discover that he had brought his two daughters to Peters­burg." Upon learning that "his daughter had become a lion-­tamer and was billed all over Europe as the daughter of the Mad Monk, I just thought that was a ­completely seductive, delightful fact," Harrison ­concludes.

She was hooked: Enchant­ments ­became a ­labor of love, a scrupulously ­researched ­retelling of the fiery end of ­Russia, the Land of the Firebird, through the eyes of ­Masha Rasputin, the 18-year-old girl who, in ­Harrison's yarn, is entrusted with the ­care of the interminably bleeding Tsarevitch Alyosha after the murder of her father.

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So we are treated to a hectic mélange of the fantastical and the fanatical—the lurid and bizarre demise of Rasputin; the exile and isolation of the Romanovs amid their ­fabled palace finery; the ­drunken, bloody-minded carryings-on of their Bolshevik captors—all recounted as the adolescent ­sexual heat between Masha and Alyosha begins to steam up the palace windows. Masha's story­telling becomes a kind of sacrament to the tsarevitch, who sees the looming end too clearly for his own good: "After I'd told Alyosha the story of the ­Virgin in the ­Silver Forest once or twice, it became something closer to a prayer than a distraction. Were I to omit a detail, ­Alyosha ­supplied it. If I changed anything inadvertently, he corrected me. It had to be the same each time, exactly the same."

Harrison breaks up this claustrophobic milieu with some marvelous riffs: Tipping her hat, for example, to both the Rolling Stones and Mikhail Bulgakov's Soviet-era surrealist masterpiece, The Master and Margarita, she has the Devil himself and his cat, Behemoth—"black as a rook, tall as a man, and standing upright on his hind legs"—instigate a beer riot that wreaks fatal mayhem on the morning of Nicholas II's coronation.

But most of all, Enchantments is about the irreducible mysteries of human motivation. Harrison, whose harrowing 1997 memoir, The Kiss, was about her relentless incestuous seduction by her long-­absent father, is drawn to our unknowability. She has begun a biography of Joan of Arc: "What's interesting about her is what's interesting about Rasputin. You can come at her from any number of vantages, and she still doesn't make sense. One doesn't want to be left saying, `Well, the angels told her what to do'—but it's kind of hard not to."

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